How To Coin Your Own Legacy Saying In IT

Intel former CEO Andy Grove: he liked to call a big change a Strategic Inflexion Point.. and it stuck. Image credit: Intel press

Everybody wants to be remembered for something. US state governors are famous for building ‘much needed’ roads so that they can have their name emblazoned on the highway signage. In technology circles, evangelists and advocates like to preface new terms with ‘this is what I like to call’ -- and then follow up with a natty name to try and evidence some new level of insight into what may be an already established theme.

Former CEO of Intel Andy Grove famously described turning the chipmaker away from memory production towards microprocessors in his book ‘Only The Paranoid Survive’. He called this the Strategic Inflexion Point (SIP) and lo, a term was cast in stone.

Blog well -- and get a bull’s-eye

Latterly in the post millennium rush for term coinage, Pentaho CTO James Dixon scored a bull’s-eye by writing a blog and using the term Data Lake. A wider and as-yet un-siphoned expanse of big data that has yet to be categorized and distilled into even the first notion of a smaller ‘datamart’ (someone must have made that up too), the Data Lake term worked well and another piece of terminology has come to pass.

Onward then to the closing days of 2016… next up the ‘oche’ throwing a dart for technical notoriety is Basho chief technology officer Dave McCrory. His view is that although the Internet of Things might well be changing the world around us, we need to form a better understanding of where the data generated by this ecosystem goes.

Data Gravity

Data Gravity is a term coined by McCrory himself to describe the effect that as data accumulates, there is a greater likelihood that additional services and applications will be attracted to this data. He could perhaps have used the term Data Magnetism here, but gravity and the magnetic poles are inextricably linked, so let’s not nitpick. The idea is that ultimately, where data is determines where the money is. Services and applications are nothing without it.

McCrory blogs as follows, “Consider data as if it were a planet or other object with sufficient mass. As data accumulates (builds mass) there is a greater likelihood that additional services and applications will be attracted to this data. This is the same effect gravity has on objects around a planet. As the mass or density increases, so does the strength of gravitational pull. As things get closer to the mass, they accelerate toward the mass at an increasingly faster velocity.”

The Basho CTO’s post goes on to discuss Artificial Data Gravity i.e. the creation of attractive forces through indirect or outside influence. This could be something such as costs, throttling, specialization, legislative controls, usage, or other forms. Basho itself works to provide technology for distributed systems to scale large amounts of unstructured data, while maintaining data availability when machines fail. So with this discussion then, lo, a new term ‘may possibly’ have been cast in stone.

This is what I like to call jargon-jumping

Looking ahead, we now know that the act to describe this new penchant for naming technology (or other industry) developments for posterity has its own name.

This is now known in technical dictionary terms as ‘jargon-jumping’ (verb): [jahr-guh n, -gon] [jumhp-ing v,] -- the tendency and proclivity seen among post-modern technologist futurist evangelists to attempt to name an activity, behavior type or other physical phenomenon for the purposes of explanation, clarity and posterity.

Just kidding, or are we?

As data accumulates (builds mass) there is a greater likelihood that additional services and applications will be attracted to this data. Image: Basho